Javier Miley began his libertarian economic experiment to transform Argentina. In a series of reports, The Telegraph's global economics editor Ambrose Evans-Pritchard travels through what was once one of the world's richest countries to find out whether “shock therapy” could work.
Memories of the Falklands War cannot fade in the sleepy working-class town of Escobar, an automotive hub at the mouth of the River Plate.
The mayor says the building, with an old howitzer parked outside, is a combined museum and social club for veterans of the Malvinas Islands. The sign above the entrance simply says “always ours” and “forbidden to forget.”
The former conscripts are a close-knit group, some bitter about their treatment at the hands of the British, others philosophical about the adrenaline of war, but all polite and absolutely convinced of the righteousness of the Argentine cause.
< p>Nestor Gomez was seriously wounded by machine gun fire fire when the Scots Guards attacked his army unit in the final days of the conflict near Fort Stanley.
“If it weren’t for the British doctor, I would have lost my legs,” he said over black coffee and Medialuna croissants in a room decorated with maps, ships and units in which they served.
“He treated everyone the same, whether they were Argentinians or British. He was very kind to us: this must be admitted. His name was Rick Jolly,” he said.
In Escobar, a museum dedicated to the Falklands or Malvinas War also serves as a social role. club of Argentine conflict veterans, pictured with our writer
On the wall hung a map of the Operation Rosario, detailing the exact movements of troops and landing craft on April 2, 1982, the day Argentine troops entered Fort Stanley. None of Escobar's teenage recruits at the time had any idea what they were getting into.
“I was 19 years old and knew absolutely nothing. We all thought it would be so easy,” said Enrique Aguilar, a mechanic on the Type 42 destroyer Hercules. She was built at the Vickers shipyard in Barrow-on-Furness, sister to HMS Sheffield.
“None of us thought that the British were going to fight. We did not yet realize how serious this was until the sinking of the cruiser Belgrano. It was then that I realized that the engine room is the most dangerous place on a warship. That's what they're trying to do first, turn off the lights and power,” he said.
The city pays four veterans to fly to the islands each year to visit the graves. The recently returned quads were outraged by this reception.
“The islanders were incredibly hostile. They charged us £15 to enter San Carlos Cemetery, which in my opinion is dishonest,” said Julio Penalba, a former military engineer and now a bank manager.
Aging veterans win the battle for recognition . from the Argentine nation, but only after many years of oblivion.
“When the war ended, they wanted to sweep everything that happened in 1982 under the rug and never talk about it,” said Juan Carlos Monti, president of Escobar's group.
>”But we didn't let them forget, and over the years it came out from under the rug and we found our place,” he said.
Escobar's veterans received a chilly reception from Falkland Islanders when they returned to pay tribute to their war dead. Photo: Rocío Morale Otero
The striking thing about every city across Argentina is how urgent this problem has become again – much more acute than when I last visited during the hyperinflation crisis in 1989. the flame is alive.
In the central park there is a cenotaph for the fallen. Nearby is the hall of frescoes of the Malvinas Islands. Billboards erected by the families of the victims line the main path. The narration is as objective as possible.
It tells the story of the relationship between the Spanish and British imperial possessions in the 18th century. He accuses the military dictatorship of General Leopoldo Galtieri of waging a diversionary political war in order to avoid an economic crisis. But it also states emphatically that Argentina's claims are “a just cause.”
“Forty-two years after the war, the Malvinas issue has acquired new political power, and “remembering the boys “has become a form of patriotic sacrament.” , says the left-wing Center for Legal and Social Studies (CELS).
It's a powerful political current that President Javier Miley must navigate as he tries to hold Argentina together with what he calls “the most ambitious shock therapy in human history.”
He's not inherently interested in that. national sovereignty or the Westphalian concept of the state. His political Bible is Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom. This is a limitless ideology. His intellectual affinity is with American and British libertarian conservatism, and this gets him into trouble in Argentina.
Peronists believed they had found his Achilles heel during the election campaign when he declared that any solution to the Falkland Islands problem required the consent of the islanders and could only be achieved through diplomacy.
“We cannot deny that they are already on land, or refuse to acknowledge their existence. Of course, their interests must be taken into account,” he said.
He compounded the heresy by calling Margaret Thatcher “one of mankind's greatest leaders” – a transformative figure who set in motion the collapse of communism and “suppressed the left”. Most Argentines are accustomed to thinking of her as the “great pirate.”
“You have to confess: Is Thatcher your idol?” he was asked in a key phrase of the presidential debate. Miley fought back with a counterattack on the plastic patriots and refused to back down from Lady Thatcher.
He survived the fight and won a landslide victory a few days later. Disgust for la casta peronista took precedence over everything else. Next time it may be more difficult.
Britain's relations with Argentina hit rock bottom under the last government after Sir Alan Duncan wrote in his memoirs that the country's deputy foreign secretary had previously drank a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label. signed a document on cooperation at the British embassy and was “so angry” that he could not remember what he agreed on the next morning.
“True, there was a lot of drinking, but that was later, and the minister himself was a teetotaler . But this caused such a scandal in Argentina that the poor guy still had to resign,” said one of the witnesses of that bacchanalian evening.
Sir Alan later admitted to poetic license. The damage was done. The Peronists broke the agreement.
Javier Miley says “chest-beating chauvinism” will not reclaim the Falkland Islands. Argentina must become an eligible country to join and work to win over the islanders. “No one will listen to the statements of serial defaulters and corrupt politicians,” he said.
“You have to offer them something worthwhile, and you're not doing that now if this is the country people want.” Leave. Are you really going to force the islanders to become Argentines, reduce them to poverty and drag them into poverty? admiration for Margaret Thatcher and his insistence that diplomacy prevail on the Falkland Islands issue
Miley has a two-pronged strategy to seduce the kelpers, as they are called here: raise Argentina to OECD per capita income levels through the revival of the capitalist free market; and a turn towards Anglo-Saxon powers in defense and foreign policy.
During his trip to Davos in January, world figures invited him to hold more than 60 bilateral meetings. He only accepted two, and one was with British Foreign Secretary Lord Cameron.
Now we have an idea of what is in development. Britain has since dropped its objections to the sale of American F-16 fighter jets from Denmark's old stockpile as part of a move agreed with Washington to tie Argentina into Western security arrangements.
Lord Cameron's trip to the Falkland Islands in February, with lofty talk of their eternal place as a British territory, is best understood as an attempt to calm jittery islanders who might suspect the ground is slipping away from under their feet. .
Foreign Secretary Lord David Cameron visited the islands to reassure locals that they were part of the British family. No. 39; Photo: Stefan Rousseau/PA WireThat's why Miley sought to downplay the political storm. “I don't see this as a provocation,” he told the BBC.
In April, Miley stunned Argentina by appearing with the head of US Southern Command at the Antarctic port of Ushuaia and announcing the creation of a joint military patrol base. Strait of Magellan, which effectively closed the access of the Chinese fleet to the region.
Miley justified this US military base to domestic critics as “the greatest assertion of Argentine sovereignty in 40 years, the first step towards the idea of reclaiming the Malvinas Islands.”
The logic is that if Argentina stops flirting with the authoritarian axis and fully enters the free world, it could eventually open the door to negotiations with London.
“Many positions have changed over time,” he told the BBC.
It could also soften the islanders' implacable opposition to some kind of hybrid arrangement offering autonomous self-government – like Greenland under Danish sovereignty today.
What such a formula might look like is anyone's guess. Sir Lawrence Freedman, in his official history of the Falkland Islands, reports that the Thatcher government held secret negotiations in 1980, proposing a deal that would transfer titular sovereignty to Argentina, but with a 99-year leaseback. The Argentine side wanted something closer to 30 years.
Foreign Secretary Nicholas Ridley, seeking to reach an agreement, met his Argentine counterpart at the Hotel du Lac in Coppe on Lake Leman under the cover of his family. trip to paint watercolors. The plan collapsed when Falkland Islanders and MPs learned of the moves.
By that time, the junta in Buenos Aires had come to the conclusion that Great Britain was ready to give up the islands and would not respond to a landing attack. General Galtieri's second mistake was to think that Ronald Reagan would give him a free hand.
It is far from clear whether Javier Miley will be able to stick to his plan for the Malvinas Islands once his political honeymoon is over and long-standing forces in Argentine politics will reassert themselves. His governing coalition represents an uneasy pact between libertarian anarcho-capitalism on one side and something closer to Falangist-Catholic nationalism on the other.
Miley faces conflict with Vice President Victoria Villarruel (right), the daughter of a Falklands War veteran. Photo: Agustin Markarian/REUTERS
His vice-president, Victoria Villarruel, is the daughter of a right-wing army officer and a Falkland Islands veteran who refused to take an oath of allegiance to the constitution.
She is the author of The Silenced Dead: Civilian Casualties of Argentina's Terrorist Guerrillas of the 1970s. “Victoria Villarruel has Argentine blue blood,” said the Center for Legal and Social Research.
The think tank said emotions in the Malvinas Islands are being mobilized to return the Argentine military to a central place in national life. washing away the sins of dictatorship. It states that officers convicted of torture are being rehabilitated.
Miley is laser-focused on the economy and leaves the Villarruel wing of his government to operate in parallel. But he also leaned towards them to cover his flank, agreeing to the use of the military for policing purposes for the first time since the restoration of democracy.
“The political class wanted to wipe out our collective memory by persecuting and humiliating our armed forces . I say time has passed. You are a source of pride for our nation, and in this new Argentina you will receive the respect that has long been denied you,” he said in a message to veterans last month.
It’s hard. so that an outsider can judge whether this is truly the beginning of a militaristic revival or whether the hypersensitive left sees shadows on the wall. Every normal country glorifies its armed forces.
What can be said is that culture wars and social media chaos have combined with the meteoric rise of Javier Miley to destroy all containment structures and uncork elements that may turn out to be difficult to control.
Argentina is not alone in this.
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